Inspiration

Elbonia is used by Adams whenever a "foreign" element is needed in
Dilbert, in order not to mention a real country and offend
people overseas who may be from that country. Adams has said that
many people think of the mud as snow, a
limitation of the black-and-white daily strips, but that either way
is fine with him. He has commented that Elbonia essentially is
based on most Americans' stereotypes of a developing country with
immense problems. Or, as Adams put it, "any country without
Cable TV".

Elbonia bears some resemblance to one of the venues in Al Capp's long-running strip Li'l Abner: a nation called Lower
Slobbovia (based on Siberia), whose citizens are perpetually
seen in waist-deep snow and ice.

Many
readers have assumed Elbonia to be a play on Albania, and the
apparent Eastern European setting and Communist history provide
some basis for this claim. An episode of the TV series
featured "ethnic Elbonians" fleeing political persecution, a
possible reference to the Kosovo
War.

However, Elbonia also contains a homophone of "elbow", a fact
referenced in another fictitious neighbouring nation called
"Kneebonia", with which Elbonia sometimes wants to wage a
war.

Adams does not always avoid mentioning other countries. For
instance, in his strip for March 8, 2009, the strip mentions
Indians who speak perfect English as the "higher-priced"
outsourcing option, resulting in one angry Elbonian who doesn't
even know he has the customer support job, being the least-priced
option.

Government

Elbonia's government is a dictatorship,
run by a military strongman. Dogbert briefly
deposed the President and made himself dictator; he then began a
campaign to increase Elbonian tourism by
making gambling and prostitution not only legal, but mandatory,
thus turning it into something like Las Vegas. He and Dilbert (who acted as his advisor) wound
up fleeing the palace when they mistook the Elbonians' coming to
them bearing farm tools as an uprising — it turned out they were calling him to
preside over a farm holiday. This was the
protracted series of strips during which the "jowly" boss was
replaced by the Pointy-Haired
Boss. A similar storyline appeared in the TV Series episode
"Elbonian Trip".

Some strips reference a "North Elbonia", which is still Communist. It appears to be based loosely on North Korea. North Elbonia was destroyed when they used
a giant laser manufactured by Dilbert's
employer; the manual had been made by
Tina out of anger related to how women in North Elbonia are
mistreated (at least according to Dilbert).

Residents

Virtually all of the Elbonians have beards,
even the females and infants, and wear tall grey hats and black
mittens. (Plop centers on a
hairless, beardless child, a rarity in Elbonia.) Elbonians are
commonly portrayed as idiotic and backward, which can make some
strips look xenophobic: foreigners are not only different, which
would be expected, they are always less evolved somehow.

There is extreme prejudice against left-handed Elbonians, to the
point where the factions squared off in a civil war (see below).
The TV series shows that left-handed Elbonains are forced to work
in the country's sweatshops, overseen by right-handed bosses.

Elbonian pigs have intelligence and social
standing comparable to the humans and are sometimes shown as having
a role in the government. In an early Dilbert strip, Wally orders a mail-order bride
from Elbonia, only to receive a pig dressed in women's clothing,
later cooking it to make a BLT
sandwich.

There are "mud weasels" living in the mud that can bite
people.

Economy

Much of the Elbonian economy is mud-based. In one cartoon the
Elbonians discover that the mud is caused by an abundance of
oil and coal near the
surface. Another strip claimed that the Elbonians became rich by
selling the mud as a couch cosmetic on the Home Shopping Network. According to
Dogbert, "They sold their country in little jars. Most of the
Elbonians perished in the fiery core of the earth".

Dilbert's company often uses Elbonia as a source of cheap labor and
general outsourcing - the Pointy-Haired Boss approves of
outsourcing programming or documentation tasks to them on a regular
basis. However, these cost-savings attempts regularly backfire. For
example, the computer code developed in Elbonia was only documented
in Elbonian, and the debugging costs alone
were more than what it would have cost to develop the entire
program in-house. In the TV
series, Dilbert's company had the Gruntmaster 6000 manufactured
in an Elbonian plant named "Elboco inc.".

When Dilbert's company won the bid to build a cell phone network for the Elbonians, the
Elbonian government would not sign the contract until they were
given plans for a nuclear weapon.
Dilbert instead gave them plans for a giant toaster, and they were foiled by a lack of highly
enriched bread.

Another instance is when Dilbert's company contracted Elbonia to
launch their satellite. This has been mentioned twice in the comic,
and the Elbonians have tried to accomplish it in two different
ways. The first involved a giant slinghot, which failed, presumably
resulting in the destruction of the satellite, as one Elbonian
commented "I hope those things aren't expensive.". Another way that
was tried, was to anger a pig and hope it would kick the satellite
into orbit. One of the problems listed was if the pig preferred
fisticuffs over kicking. Unfortunately, the Elbonians had to abort
when the pig brought out a sledge hammer.

Once Dogbert enslaved several Elbonians to make running shoes, as
he "just got a huge order" for them. When one tried to get Dilbert
to help, Dilbert pepper-sprayed him saying "I like helping people,
but I also like inexpensive shoes."

In Plop, the "Church of Elbonia" is mentioned as the main
religion in Elbonia (possibly a reference
to Anglicanism) which deliberately
mixes the faith's religious and financial aspects, telling people
they will suffer at a certain level for eternity depending on how
much money they donate to the COE.

Elbonia is depicted as a technologically outdated country:
"Telephones" are actually cans attached to
the ends of strings and the means of "air transportation"
(Elbonia Airlines) is flinging people from a giant
slingshot (something Dilbert hates to do because he loses his
luggage and gets head-deep into mud). In the TV series, "Elbonia
Airlines" uses planes assembled from what looks like scrap metal and clapboard, and there are no
runways, so the plane just lands in the mud. In a recent strip,
where Wally goes there, they use planes, but the passengers just
jump out of the plane, trying to "land on a plump Elbonian to cushion their fall."

War

For many years Elbonia has been mired, as it were, in a civil war between the left- and right-handed
Elbonians, although the war was mostly (possibly entirely)
bloodless, as the Elbonians did not realize they were allowed to
use weapons. The rebels were led by "The Fox",
who Dilbert accidentally killed when he was launched to the rebel
camp by Elbonia Airlines and landed on The Fox. Elbonia has also
threatened its neighbor, Kneebonia, with nuclear weapons launched
by slingshot.

Elbonia
was also briefly engaged in a war with France, that
erupted when Dilbert's company gave them the bid of launching a
French spy satellite, which resulted
in the disastrous slingshot launch of the satellite into the French
Embassy in Elbonia. After a brief
bombing campaign, France ended the war after realizing that there
was nothing of value to bomb and the Elbonian GNP tripled when the citizens sold the bomb shrapnel as
scrap metal. (A parody of Laos, where a
huge number of citizens actually do this for a living.
Except with plentiful unexploded munitions mixed in) This temporary
rise in wealth caused the Elbonians to try to instigate another war
with France by standing in front of the newly rebuilt French
Embassy and insulting French wine and traditional cuisine, which
ultimately failed.

More recently, Wally was sent to teach the Elbonians how to operate
a software program, only to lead to the rise of an Elbonian
insurgency against his "arrogant" ways. One of the Elbonians
explains "It's something we do." The country was again plunged into
civil war, after which Wally left the country, refusing to admit to
what happened due to his arrival.

In the TV series, Elbonian strongman Petrunyik Vostominitz used the
"tomeato" (a food product made by Dilbert to end world hunger) as
an explosive weapon to extort neighboring countries "just for
kicks". Also in the TV series, Elbonian guards, police officers,
and soldiers are armed with small arms that look like Heckler &
Koch MP5s.